More standards, alliances for NetSuite

SaaS vendors give CIO UK sneak peak

By Miya Knights

May 24, 2007

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On-demand business management software provider, NetSuite has hinted at more major announcements in the pipeline later this year.

The battle for the software-as-a-service (SaaS) mid-market is hotting up as NetSuite executives were in London this week to announce the availability of its hosted enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications on mobile platforms.

Craig Sullivan, NetSuite vice president of international products said quite a few companies were already using their instances of the SaaS suite on mobile devices like Blackberrys, Windows Mobile and Palm devices.

“This announcement is similar to the other partners we have on our integration and development platform, SuiteFlex. They have the specialist knowledge of an industry vertical or process and can work with the customer to make sure they get the functionality they need,” he said. Third party software development and consultany companies, Antenna Software, Explore Mobile and iEnterprises are among the first to deploy NetSuite functionality natively to mobile devices.

In the meantime, Sullivan also hinted at major news announcements coming mid-year, as well as upcoming releases around UK wins from accounting software provider, Sage. “These companies are coming to us because they find there’s no real upgrade path to scale the various different versions of Sage with the growth of their businesses, making integration and migration difficult,” he said. “With NetSuite, they get a single system that, being online, offers lower overheads and can grow with them to enable functionality like multi-locations and single, integrated customer processes.”

The company also hinted at some big-name IT vendor alliances and standards-based developments for its next release.

A standards group launched last week by a group of SaaS vendors shows the way convergence on an agreed set of existing open standards when integrating SaaS applications and other on-demand services could develop in future.

The initiative is called OpenSAM and stands for Open Simple Ajax Mashups. Founding application vendors iNetOffice, ShareMethods, EditGrid, EchoSign, Persony, Joyent, Caspio, Liferro, Sheetster and Preezo will collaborate to develop a a set of asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming recommendations based on open standards that allow multiple online applications to integrate. “It enables the internet as a platform for "plug and play" office productivity suites tailored for specific business needs,” stated the organisation at the launch.